


In The Mountain

by purpleseas



Category: Outlast (Video Games)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Bisexuality, Child Abuse, Disgusting Descriptions, Domestic Violence, F/M, Gross, Horror, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Kissing, M/M, Misogyny, Murder, Near Death Experiences, No Sex, Non-Sexual Intimacy, Possession, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Serial Killers, Sexual Abuse, Stockholm Syndrome, Unresolved Romantic Tension, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-07-24
Updated: 2015-07-24
Packaged: 2018-04-10 23:22:07
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,865
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4411871
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/purpleseas/pseuds/purpleseas
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In a state much deeper than dreaming, between life and death, Waylon is lost in Mount Massive.  Only Miles can guide him out of the nightmare world of Eddie Gluskin and back to the reality of his escape and survival.  Along the way, other troubled souls will need their help.</p><p>(Rated for canon-typical gory grossness [possibly worse, not kidding with the gross and disgusting tags!] and canon's general existence in the story.  There are bits of remembered and imagined sex, but no real sex scenes.  Fair warning/enticement depending on how you feel about Eddie: Waylon has some complicated feelings about him while in captivity, and there's considerable exploration of him later on, but this really isn't a shippy, redemptive or otherwise positive story about him.  The rape warning applies to explicit content about Eddie's upbringing, past crimes and plans for Waylon.  No rape occurs on-page.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	In The Mountain

Waylon is sinking to the floor again. He’s made of wet clay now, thick and sloppy. He’s been standing and swaying with the Groom for far too long. So many corny old songs. Sometimes he hopes that whoever left all these ancient cassette tapes in the vocational block met an especially violent end. Sometimes he hopes they never suffer so much as a papercut. They’re helping postpone the consummation, after all. If it ever happens. For all his bluster about planting his seed, Eddie is in no hurry. Every dance is their first as man and wife. Every moment is a celebration. 

Waylon wonders what would happen if he died right now, in Eddie’s embrace. Maybe Eddie would string him up just as he is, the lone clothed body in his collection, in a place of honor. Maybe he’d watch every minute of Waylon’s decomposition, admiring his changing beauty until it was time to join his beloved in the hereafter. Maybe he’d finally take his wife to bed and ravish her. Maybe he’d just keep dancing. Forever, he promised Waylon in the chapel. I’ll never let you go. 

“Be careful, darling,” Eddie says. “Don’t swoon away just yet.”

He pulls Waylon back up toward his chest, a solid wall of muscle that might be reassuring under other circumstances. Here and now, it’s the coldest of comforts. He might as well be leaning on the mountain outside. It would understand and empathize with his suffering about as effectively as Eddie does. He’s been gentle with Waylon since the operation, at least. He still finds others to beat and torture and mutilate, without pretense now. No talk of love and family, no _darling_ for them. Only pain and hatred. Eddie burns through them faster than ever, now that he’s found his true bride. Waylon envies them terribly.

He’s lingered for days. The chills won’t stop now. His exhausted, ruined body is running out of fuel for the fire. The groove cut through his abdomen and the mess between his legs don’t hurt anymore, but they still make a great show of festering and oozing, staining his white dress in various colors. He doubts the smell of rotten flesh registers with Eddie after such prolonged exposure, but Waylon smells like someone cut down all the bodies in the gym and threw them in a septic tank with the intention to make soup. Eddie takes long, deep breaths as they dance, and Waylon has to wonder what that _love’s arbor_ smells like to him. He doesn’t want to think about what he looks like. He hasn’t seen himself since the dress fitting, when a proudly smiling Eddie forced him in front of a cracked mirror and fished for compliments. His hands were tied, his nose bleeding from Eddie’s fists, his eyes ancient and empty with the knowledge that he still had the operation to look forward to. If Eddie ever washed his face, Waylon wasn’t conscious for it, but he knows he’s so, so beautiful. His husband keeps telling him so.

Eddie hums softly and squeezes Waylon closer. Something pokes at Waylon’s lower abdomen, threatening to venture further down. Something perfectly proportionate to its owner and just as insistent. Waylon should be afraid. He should be drowning in dread at the prospect of having his pain reawakened, intensified, made enormously and undeniably more intimate, but all he has is grief. Imprisoned, chased, hunted, his body was still his own. Its shape and function were the same as ever while he crept in slow motion and ran in fast-forward. Every new mutilation he saw gave him a small, quiet sense of gratitude. At least he had his hands. His feet. His face. At least he still looked like the man Lisa kissed goodbye two weeks ago, smiling through the ache of separation as he promised to come home as soon as he could, waving with the boys as he drove away. All of them so beautiful his heart hurt. As one horror sprang from the shadow of another, he told himself that no matter what happened in his head, he hadn’t been subjected to enough of the treatment to physically change the way the other inmates had. His people would still know him on sight. The boys would run to him. Lisa would take him in her arms and make him believe everything would be okay. But none of that can happen now. There’s no way every second he’s spent here isn’t carved into his face, etched into his eyes. One more new mutation, ordinary in this place but monstrous to the outside world. It’s not even human anymore, a guard shouted as he rushed to block Waylon’s path, long ago and far from here. One look at him would make his children scream and his wife sob. By the time they learned to look at him again, his brain would already be spinning through the roulette wheel of the Engine’s varying effects. If some savior magically appeared to him now, offering an instant cure for the infection and and several armies’ worth of weapons and armor to get them out of here safely, Waylon isn’t sure what he’d say.

The operation was more painful than he could have imagined, a suffocating, ludicrous pain that made waking up afterward the worst surprise of his life. Eddie had nothing for him but the aerosol again. He spent his waking hours trying to feel something beyond the immediate pain. Emasculation. Humiliation. Anything. His mind wandered over and over his body as he lay in bed, as still and silent as a discarded doll. Here’s where he brought the knife down from my sternum, through my navel. Here’s where it traversed my lower abdomen on its way down to my pubic hair. Then it gets really messy. A jagged confusion of raw meat churned up by the saw, surrounding a deep stab wound. Eddie made it so narrow that it would undoubtedly rip when penetrated, which was probably the point. He had to have a maidenhead to conquer. It’s gaping with decay now, overflowing with it, a ridiculous parody of arousal. Here’s the place the Groom made to push inside. Here’s the sum of everything this man believes about women: a sloppy hole that can only disappoint. A fuzzy unreality crept in during that first day or two, as the wound swelled closed and seemed to stay that way for a long time. Maybe he really was a doll, not only still and silent but sexless. Smooth as a Barbie, as if nothing was ever there. Nothing to give him and Lisa pleasure, or give life to any more children, or produce so much as a satisfying stream of piss. You’re nobody’s mother, Eddie ranted in his memory. Nobody’s father. Nobody’s husband. Nobody. Then he began to rot. 

It’s been raining since Eddie caught him, heavily and constantly. Trying to wash Mount Massive away. Good luck. He likes to watch the rain from the big window across from the marriage bed. There’s a pane missing, so he can hear it a little more clearly than he can here. He sleeps better in there than he imagined he would, lulled by the sound of water on old wood and glass. The creaking, screaming, whimpering din of this place drowns in it. Even Eddie’s constant activity, sewing and sawing and hunting and singing, fades into soft white noise in that room. If Waylon could get back there now, be there alone for a while, he’s sure he could die very easily. It’s only a matter of letting it happen, of finally slipping away. Waylon can almost smile at the idea that comes to him then. _That’s so ridiculous that he’ll probably buy it,_ Lisa’s voice says in his mind. _You know he’d love to hear how perfectly he’s succeeded this time. He wanted a win so badly._ He lets her coach him through it, the way she always did when he was nervous or scared. She’s the reasonable one. The one left for the boys. She has to be okay. Please let her be okay.

“Eddie,” he rasps out, resenting the effort it takes, hating how weak and sick and small he sounds. “I was wondering...”

Craning his neck to meet Eddie’s eyes nearly topples Waylon again. His head drops back so heavily that for a blissful second or two, he’s sure it’ll simply snap off. Eddie looks down at him with the same wide open smile he had when he first found Waylon down here. When he appeared at the door, a green phantom of absurdist joy. When Waylon should have smashed the glass between them and shoved every shard into his brain. As if he could have. 

“Yes, my bride?”

 _Talk like him,_ Lisa says. “Are we to have no wedding cake? I would love something sweet...” _Try to be alluring, inviting, but not more than he can handle. Not like me. You know he’d have no idea what to do with a real live woman who really wanted him. Remember that you’re nothing but a delicacy he wants to unwrap._ “Before we share the sweetest thing.”

He hopes the flinching, desperate thing his face is doing looks enough like a smile to be persuasive. Eddie stares at him with a blankness he’s come to understand as a reliable precursor to violence. Well, it was worth a try. Waylon braces for rage and pain and slut and whore, hoping it’ll be enough to finish him off this time. Eddie gives him a lover’s sigh instead, enraptured. If his breath was as putrid as their surroundings, Waylon could understand it. He could, maybe, find a little moment of empathy in it. No one here is minty fresh, least of all Waylon. It’s pretty inevitable when every semblance of order goes out the window. But Eddie smells like rain on old soot, like dust untouched for years, like distant smoke rolling closer and closer. Like the Walrider.

“Forgive me, darling,” Eddie breathes out quickly. “In all this excitement, I’d quite forgotten. Such a beautiful bride deserves only the best. Wait here, and I’ll bring you a cake worthy of a queen.”

“May I wait in...on the bed? If I could lie down for a moment...”

Eddie’s bleeding eyes narrow. “Don’t tell me you’re too tired to consummate our love.” 

Waylon’s empty cavern of a stomach turns. The fear is weak now, a drop of adrenaline where he used to feel flood after flood, but it never goes away. Just kill me now. Get it over with. You can’t even imagine how fucking tired I am.

“No, I...I was only thinking that when you get back, we could sit together, before...It would be so romantic. We could f-feed each other. Nurture each other. Now and forever.” _I don’t know, baby. Maybe it’s over the top. Maybe it’s not enough. Give it a good finish, anyway. Baffle him with bullshit._ “My love.”

Eddie’s smile is soft and loving and sweetly surprised. For a second, there’s nothing else. He’s a pinpoint of light in the black hole Waylon has vanished into for all time. To be loved like this is divine. Waylon’s heart bursts open. His big, salty tears drip onto the breasts Eddie fashioned out of the skin and fat he cut from Waylon’s belly. Raw flesh stings like hell. One breast has collapsed while the other has filled with pus, the pressure unbearable. Waylon clenches his teeth until the urge to scream about it, about all of it, passes. He doesn’t care to find out which would last longer, his energy or his luck. _Keep smiling, Waylon. Just keep smiling._

“My clever wife,” Eddie says, wiping away Waylon’s tears without concern, as if they came from pure, simple joy. “What a wonderful idea. And I must carry you over the threshold!”

He says it like it’s new and special, but he’s been carrying Waylon around since the operation. Neither of them had much choice in the matter, with Eddie eager to start nesting and Waylon unable to walk three steps without collapsing. Waylon’s lower leg isn’t aware that he’s dying. It still screams bloody murder every time he remembers it exists. Figures. He’d probably have to use a cane if he lived. Probably in pain every time the weather changed, like an old man. Eddie lifts him effortlessly, but at a terrible angle, as usual. Waylon bites his lip to keep from crying out as his weight presses down on his shin. When it passes, he could cry again, with gratitude. At least it didn’t last long, and he won’t have to endure it again. It’ll all be over soon. 

He’s never been able to map out their new living area in his head, but he knows they’re still in the vocational block. Sometimes he can hear Dennis arguing with himself from somewhere up above, like heaven’s strangest angel. Somewhere else, away from the sewing machines and the stinking gym, Eddie has built their love nest. He lays Waylon on a fairly clean pile of the thin mattresses strewn all over this place. He’s pilfered every emergency candle in this wing of the asylum and arranged them with surprising tastefulness, like some mirror universe Martha Stewart. Waylon always expects flowers and chocolates as well, but they must be hard to come by these days. 

Eddie sits on the side of the bed and stares at him with overwhelming affection, with desire enough to forget all about the cake and consummate the marriage right now. The relentless enthusiasm he brought to the chase and the mutilation will probably pale in comparison. It would undoubtedly hasten Waylon’s death, but who knows how long that would feel to his threadbare psyche. _Get him refocused. Make him go away. You can do this without getting hurt again._

He reaches out an unsteady hand, preternaturally pale even in candlelight. Eddie gasps faintly when the hand finds his face and softly strokes his blood-sticky cheek. He smiles so rapturously that Waylon is almost angry with himself for not fighting death, for planning to leave this poor, neglected, thoroughly gullible man a widower. Poor fool. Poor abused child nobody ever loved the right way. Poor psychotic serial killer with a diseased heap of clammy skin for a wife. _Poor Waylon._

“I’ll be waiting for you,” he manages to say, before his throat closes and he can’t say anything at all. 

“Yes, darling,” Eddie answers, and kisses Waylon’s hand with dry, rough lips. His breath is hot on Waylon’s skin, unabashedly carnal, but only for a second, thankfully. Eddie inhales deeply, savoring his bride’s intoxicating scent. What a wonderful world he lives in, at long last. Not a thing out of place. Not a single ugly thought in his wife’s pretty little head. 

He can’t seem to stop looking back at Waylon as he leaves, always with that sweet surprise. Maybe Waylon has made him a new man. Maybe he’ll break away from the Engine and escape this place after Waylon dies. Maybe if he had real doctors in a real hospital, he’d come to understand what he’s done and feel _Waylon, come on. There are how many dozen bodies in that gym and around that table saw? And however many women he killed on the outside before that? They didn’t make this one a monster, they only fed him. He’s never going to get better. Remember who did this to you. Remember who took you away from us._

He remembers. It doesn’t stop him from wanting to cry for Eddie. For everyone stuck in this place, past and present. Not future, he hopes, but it’s hard to see an end to it. If that reporter he tipped off ever made it in here, he’s probably decomposing somewhere in the main building by now. Should have told him to bring an AK-47. Or a nuclear warhead. The man’s name is on the tip of Waylon’s tongue, but he’ll never remember it in this state. Poor nameless journalist. Maybe it was quick, at least. If Waylon had known it would be like this, if he could have imagined any of it at all...He fucked up bad.

 _Waylon, don’t. Go to sleep before Eddie comes back. Close your eyes and imagine you’re home with me. I’ll be right there with you. I’ll hold your hand like you held mine in the hospital when we had our boys. Come back to me._

It’d be a lot easier if his feet weren’t so cold. He looks down at them accusingly. Still bare, as they have been since he was thrown headfirst into this hell, since he hit the ground running in the experiment rooms. Black and brown with dirt and dried blood and shit and rot, layer upon layer. Some of it vague, smeared and diluted by the piss and fetid water he’s run through, only to be replaced by the fresh filth of Eddie’s lair. Two toes are webbed together with a rubbery piece of viscera. He wonders for a moment who it belonged to, what the man would say about standing with Waylon at the altar and staying for the wedding night. Waylon closes his eyes and pulls at the blanket, a scratchy patchwork of old, heavy wool, probably collected from the wards. It takes a damn year just to flick a little of it over his feet. Eddie’s so good at sewing. Very thoughtful of him to make this blanket. Waylon will be warm for the rest of his life.

He can’t tell if he’s falling asleep or dying now. Maybe they feel the same. The dress looks different in this light, in his peripheral vision. It’s cleaner, whiter, softer, not made of dusty canvas. It takes him back to his real wedding day. Lisa is a vision now, not a disembodied voice. There she is laughing at herself as she flubs the vows she’s written to him, then at Waylon when he does the same. She’s dancing at the reception, fast and slow, with stars in her eyes. She’s in white lace and garters, hot and wet and eager for him when they’re finally alone again. He’s waking in the hotel room near dawn, looking over at her sleeping face. Her ambitious bridal hairdo has gone wild from sex and sleep. She’s snoring softly, the pillow pressing her cheek up toward her eye, a little sheen of drool at the corner of her half-open mouth. She’s completely real and utterly perfect at once. My wife, he’s thinking, realizing for the first time that he doesn’t need words like fiancee or modifiers like future anymore. This is my wife. My beautiful, brilliant, hilarious wife. 

My clever wife. Darling.

God damn you, Eddie, get out of here. You never know when to shut up. 

Waylon squeezes his eyes shut tighter and tighter, trying to force himself to drift away again, but it’s no good. Like trying to fall back asleep on a Saturday morning at home with everyone mowing their lawns at once and the boys playing at the top of their lungs. Someone screams in the distance and is scolded for it. The familiar sound of Eddie Gluskin admonishing yet another slut. One more for the rope. How can there be anyone left? Waylon’s crying before he can stop himself, sobbing before he’s aware of the hitch in his breathing. He’ll never be free of this place. None of them will. 

Sometimes he’s surprised at how easily tears come now that he has so much time for them, but he can’t sustain them anymore. His eyes are drifting closed again. He can feel Lisa’s hand on his own, soft and warm and clean. _Here it is. Stop thinking. Just go. Slip under warm water and listen to the silence. I love you, Waylon. I’ll always love you._

Tell me you’re okay, Lisa. Tell me Blaire didn’t come back and hurt you. Say they didn’t put you in a place like this and take the boys away. Say you’re all still alive. Please. 

_I’ll always love you._

He knows intellectually that it’s not her. It’s only a phantom version of her, based in deep knowledge but speculative, too. Fading now, just as Waylon is fading. Its answer to his pleas doesn’t mean anything bad has happened to the real Lisa, but the thought of it finishes him. They’re gone, all three of them. Everyone here is dead or dying or irretrievably broken. There’s no one to carry Mount Massive’s secrets out into the world, for better or worse. Murkoff has gotten away with it. Waylon has destroyed his family and himself for nothing. He goes under for the last time. Only the electronic cough of a camcorder turning on pulls him back to the surface. 

Great, now he’s hallucinating. 

Someone is sitting on the edge of the bed. He’s too light to be Eddie. He doesn’t take up enough space. Waylon tries telepathy. Go chase someone else around. I’m no fun, I promise. Can’t even hobble anymore. You don’t wanna be here when he gets back, trust me. Really should have listened to the guy upstairs. He may have some issues, but he sure isn’t wrong. Waylon’s being stared at, but without a threat. His tear-sticky eyes open of their own volition. 

The mystery man lowers his camcorder, its cracked lens flashing in the candlelight. Long, narrow face and nose, wide mouth, deep-set dark eyes. No deformities. No blood. Casual clothes and a leather coat, like he just walked in from outside. Not a patient, a doctor, a guard, or another civilian contractor. What is he, a tourist? How have they both lived this long? 

“What the fuck are you doing?” the man asks, casual and only mildly annoyed, sounding for all the world like he’s found Waylon passed out in the wrong bed after a party. Like nothing else untoward is happening at all.

Waylon can’t quite manage phrases like who are you or what are you talking about. “Wh....”

The man gives him a crooked smile. “I’m Miles Upshur.” The smile turns rueful. “Got your email.”

That’s the name he was trying to think of. He typed it into a borrowed laptop about a thousand years ago. An independent who’d written about Murkoff before. There’s no way this guy made it all the way here unscathed, armed only with a camera. He’s not real. Probably decomposing somewhere in the main building by now, Waylon told himself earlier. There’s no reason to doubt it now. This close to death, you probably see all sorts of things. Brain shutting down, faculties going haywire. Here’s his chance to apologize, at least. Maybe somewhere, somehow, the real Miles Upshur will hear him.

“I’m sorry I brought you here. I’m sorry you’re dead. So sorry.”

The hallucination gives him a smirk, but Waylon doesn’t miss the flash of anger in its eyes. “Waylon,” it says, firmly and evenly. “Get up.”

“I can’t. I’m dying.”

“No, you’re not. Get up.”

Every syllable takes a little more out of him. If only he could die of exhaustion before he had to speak again. “You’re not real. Leave me alone.”

“Waylon, listen to me. You’re not in a bed. You’re not wearing a wedding dress. You’re not dying of wet gangrene. You know why? Because he didn’t cut your dick off. You think you remember what happened on that table, but you don’t. Get the fuck up and figure it out.”

Very passionate. Good show, Mr. Hallucination. “Please go away.”

“Think about it for one fucking second. How many bodies did you find? How many did you see him kill before he put you on that table? You wrote it down yourself, he was making women to kill them. You couldn’t have survived one of his _operations,_ not for days, not for your goddamn wedding. It didn’t happen.”

“Stop. Stop stop stop.”

“Don’t you want to go home? Don’t you want to be back with your family?” 

What an awful sucker punch, absolutely heartless. He can’t breathe. Whichever part of his failing brain is conjuring this up can fuck right off. “Not gonna happen.”

“Not if you don’t get off your ass and make it happen. They’re waiting for you, Waylon, alive and well. They need you. I have no reason to lie to you about any of this. All I’m trying to do is help you get out of here. Let me.” 

Waylon’s back to pulling on the blanket, this time trying to get it over his head so he can sob himself to death in complete darkness. The hallucination reaches out and shoves his hand away. Its hand is warm and solid. Pretty detailed for something that isn’t there. Waylon gasps and scrambles up the bed toward the wall. Quickly. He’s so quick, like he hasn’t been since he took that spill down the elevator shaft. His leg doesn’t hurt. Nothing does. He stares dumbly into Miles’ smug grin.

“See? Now lift up that _dress_ and see if you can find a dick. Bet you can.”

Waylon wants to look. He wants to let himself feel the shape of his body again without looking or touching, hoping against hope that he’s really okay, but he’s gone numb. He stares helplessly at Miles.

“I’m telling you the truth,” Miles says. He covers his eyes with one long-fingered hand and turns his back. “Go on, I’m not looking.” 

Waylon slowly turns away and hooks his legs over the side of the bed before lifting the dress completely. He can’t look. His hand shakes, the sensation in it returning. He’s going to plunge it right into a black mass of putrescence. It’s going to start hurting again. It’s going to stink. His atrophied stomach will come back to life and he’ll spew filth into the wound. It won’t stop. That’s how he’ll finally die.

_Waylon, that’s gross. Come on, just listen to him. It’s not like you have anything to lose._

He makes a tight, trembling fist, then releases it and touches his chest, flinching at the contact. No open wound, no failed effort at breasts. Only flatness, and the hair he thought he saw and felt Eddie remove, pluck by pluck. He takes a breath and lets his hand fall into his lap. He lets it slide down slowly to see what he can find. There it is, soft and dangling, both balls under it. Nothing’s missing, nothing’s different or even out of the ordinary. He looks. 

He wasn’t cut. He’s still intact. His body is still his own. 

“Let me know if you guys need a minute alone,” Miles says.

Waylon gives him something between a scoff and a sob. “No, we’re okay.” He laughs then, like he thought he never would again. “I’m okay.”

“You ready to get up?” Miles’ voice is gentle now, for the first time. It’s a good sound, smooth and mellow.

“Yeah.” 

Waylon wipes his eyes on the hem of the dress before he drops it. When he opens his eyes again, he’s wearing the inmate uniform they put him in forever ago. Maybe not so long now. He’s in an unfamiliar locker room, hunched in a corner. There’s no bed, no voice upstairs. No Eddie. Only that rain, and Miles above him, tall and lean. He reaches down for Waylon.

“Come on. You’re gonna be fine.”

Miles has a strong grip. Strong and secure. Waylon squeezes harder than necessary as he stands, not wanting to let go. There are sinks and mirrors on the opposite wall. He catches a tiny glimpse of the side of his head as he stands and looks away quickly. Maybe his face hasn’t changed after all. Maybe it has and Miles is too accustomed to seeing strange faces here to react. Or too polite, as far-fetched as that seems after knowing him for the past several minutes. Either way, he can’t bring himself to look. It’s easily avoidable with so many questions to ask.

“How long has it been since they caught me?”

“A day and a half, two days.”

“How’d you know what was happening to me? What I thought was happening, all that?”

Miles hesitates, a second’s pure panic crossing his face. A smooth talker in way over his head. “I know a lot of things now,” he says, and frowns at his own words.

Waylon could almost take pity on him and blindly follow him out of here, but he has to know. “What does that mean?”

His eyes are pleading, his speech too fast. “It’s complicated. Can’t you just come with me, for now? We’ll figure it out on the way, I promise.”

“I’m not going anywhere with you until you stop talking like that. And tell me why my leg doesn’t hurt, or my face, or anywhere else I was hit. And how you got this far without a mark on you. What is this, Miles? What’s going on?”

Miles gives a slow sigh that seems to deflate him. “I figured the leg would be a sticking point for you.”

“Please answer me.”

“I’m not deliberately fucking with you, I swear to God. I’m no happier to be here like this than you are, trust me. I’d tell you everything I know if I could.”

“Why can’t you?”

“I have no reason to believe it would help you. What I do have is more than one person running around in here lost and confused and stuck because I told them something they weren’t ready to believe or accept. I can pull you out of whatever nightmare you think you’re living in, but I can’t put you back where you’re supposed to be. I can’t open the door to this place and shove you back out into the world, no matter how much I want to. It’s fucked up, I’m sorry.”

He swallows hard, finally sick with fear, dizzy with it. “Did you tell me my family was alive and well just to get me out of that corner? Because they’re...Because I couldn’t accept the truth?”

“No, Waylon. I’ve lied when I had to, but never that big, never that cruel. Not for a story, not to make anyone do anything, not for any reason. I don’t have it in me to hurt you or anyone else that way.” 

Miles’ eyes are fierce, but there’s no trace of his earlier annoyance. There’s no lie in them, either. There never has been, here with Waylon. Relief staggers him, fills him to bursting. Alive. Well. Not lost in some other hell on earth, not lost to him or to themselves. Still his family. Still his loves. Miles lets him have this moment, patient and quiet until Waylon can speak again. 

“Just tell me what I have to do and I’ll do it.” 

“You have to figure out what happened to you, and what's happening now, for yourself. I can help, but I can’t do it for you.”

Waylon looks around the room at the peeling paint, the broken locker doors, the dull shroud of grime that clings to every surface in this godawful maze of a building, and knows what he’s being told. A great cosmic joke has been played on him. This is what he gets for never giving a thought to the existence of an actual, non-metaphorical afterlife, outside of a brief stoner phase in college. There is such a thing, it turns out. He gets to spend the first leg of it here, jumping through philosophical hoops.

“I get it,” he says to Miles, wishing his voice wasn’t quite so tremulous. “I wasn't dying. I’m already dead, just not from what Eddie wanted to do to me. I have to figure out what happened and accept it, then I can walk into the light or whatever it is. I’m not confused. I won’t get lost. You can tell me what happened now.”

Miles manages not to roll his eyes, but barely. “So, it’s life or afterlife, right? There’s nothing in between? After everything you’ve seen, there are still places and things that couldn’t exist?”

Eddie’s birth tableau comes back to him in all its shrieking red glory. How quickly he found it, laid out to welcome him into Gluskin’s hell. How it crashed so hard into his memory of the real thing that his vision went blank for a second. How badly it stank, so diametrically opposite to the warm, fleshy, primal air he breathed in the delivery rooms, edged with antiseptic. Miracles, high and low. It’s all out there somewhere, he knows now. Everything you can imagine, and even more you can’t. 

“We’re somewhere in between, then?”

“Pretty much.”

“Then, I’m hurt. At the very least. Something after the leg. I wouldn’t be in between if I was fine.”

He closes his eyes for a second. “Waylon, I can’t.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Waylon sighs at the ceiling.

Miles holds up his hands in mock surrender. “I know it's fucked up, okay? Didn't I just say that? You’ll figure it out. You’ll remember.”

The more Waylon struggles to piece together a picture of himself escaping Eddie, the bigger the saw looms in his mind. He can’t see beyond it. There’s nothing but his straining, rigid muscles and the _whoosh_ of air against his crotch as the blade spins, closer and closer. He tries for a second to take it forward, to feel the first bite of steel, to hear his screams obliterating every other sound, but it's not a real memory anymore. It's only a scene from a nightmare he thought he was living in for a while, like Miles said. 

“I don’t know why I can’t remember _now._ I don't know where it went. I don't know where _I_ went.”

“You will. It’ll all make sense soon enough.”

He chooses to ignore the hint of uncertainty in Miles’ eyes. “How did you find me? We haven’t met before, have we?” 

Miles gives him a tiny, sad smile. “It’s gonna be okay, Waylon.”

There’s a thickness in Waylon’s throat that won’t be swallowed or ignored. He can barely whisper through it. “Are you stuck, Miles?”

His mouth trembles. “I’m fine, don’t worry about it.” He looks away for a while, eyes unfocused, as if Waylon isn’t there anymore and he’s alone in Mount Massive again. When he finally looks back at Waylon, his smile comes easily. “Don’t even try to tell me this is the weirdest thing that’s ever happened to you.”

Waylon smiles. “I guess not. What do we do now?” 

“We start walking, we look for clues, we help where we can. It’s a little different out there now. The building can switch on you anytime. You can be in this block one minute and administration the next. It’s a pain in the ass, but you adapt.”

“And we’re not alone, you said.”

“Some made it out, some are still here. More lucid than they used to be, usually. Not interested in chasing you around anymore, thank God.”

His heart palpitates. “What about Gluskin?”

“I don’t know. I’m not surprised he got transferred here in the first place, unfortunately. They went for the most vulnerable, anonymous patients for the most part, but he’s something of a star. Looks like they had a chance to get the worst of the worst at least once, and I'm sure they were glad to take it. Needed a little variety, you know.”

“I’d never heard of him before I got here.”

“It was a big case about ten years ago. I was a crime reporter first, I interviewed him once. Tried to.” 

“How many...”

“Did he kill? Twenty-seven women over about a dozen years, all of them between the ages of nineteen and seventy. All kinds, no preferences about their looks or anything like that. You can ask me anything else you need to know, but there's not a lot of information beyond the basic. It was my first big story, I remember it all.”

“What did he do to them?”

“Beat them, mutilated their breasts and sexual organs, stabbed them. Raped their corpses. In the usual way the first few times, but then...elsewhere. Strung them up afterwards, like the ones in the gym. Covered their faces, too, like his mother covered hers before she hanged herself.”

Cold sweat drips down Waylon’s back. Maybe Eddie was waiting for Waylon’s death in his nightmare world, too, with an entirely different kind of longing, but that’s not what unnerves him most. Somehow, he got past an old hand at torture and murder, with no memory of how he could have done it. The blank spot in his mind is bigger than the saw now and twice as disconcerting. It doesn’t seem to matter that Miles knows what happened. Eddie knows. Eddie has real knowledge of him now, for the first time, free from delusion and projection. It’s his to rage or mourn or gloat over. Wherever he is.

“Elsewhere,” he repeats after Miles.

“Yeah. Lots of inadequacy issues there, lots of rage around that. There’s a physical component to it sometimes. He’d gotten very sloppy by the time he was arrested. The longer they get away with it, the more they tend to fall apart. He was found naked, covered in blood. I saw the pictures. They figured he made new holes to violate because the real ones were too big for him. I’m not saying that explains everything, but I’m sure it didn’t help.” He searches Waylon’s face. “I’m trying to demystify him for you as much as I can. In case we run into him.” He smiles. “Did I say too much?” 

Waylon must look gobsmacked. He doesn’t quite know why. It was a fairly minor detail, not something that can diminish the giant still looming in his mind. He’s left with the absurdity of having been eagerly poked by a huge phantom erection, on top of everything else. “I don’t know, I...I guess I assumed. He’s just so big everywhere else.”

“Yeah, that’s not always reliable.”

Waylon remembers the naked, oversized twins he ran into in the exercise yards and tries very hard to rub all kinds of unsavory images out of his eyes. “You said you tried to interview him.”

“He made an awful subject. That’s why there still isn’t much out there about him. Pretty frustrating.”

“So I read.”

“But when he wasn’t reminiscing about his perfect childhood or denying he’d done anything, he’d talk about hospitals and asylums and how they were run. They couldn’t watch you all the time, he said, no matter how hard they tried. Big buildings with lots of blind spots. Inevitable holes in security. Plenty of patients with the will to get free and the capacity to do just about anything to win that freedom. But his interest wasn’t in being free out in the world. Too dangerous, too easy to get caught. He only wanted to get lost in the chaos. Give me a knife and some rope and a little privacy, he said, and I’ll make do. Then he smiled at me. That goofy fucking overgrown toddler smile. Nightmares for days. That’s when I quit the serial killer beat. Went for much safer material, like war and...” He glances around the room. “Corporate malfeasance. Because I’m a pretty smart guy, apparently.” 

His tone has gone light, but Waylon’s face burns at the implication. It’s not Miles’ fault he’s here. He didn’t email himself. He wasn’t complicit in all this. “I’m so smart that I barely did any research before I started working for them,” Waylon counters. “I didn’t read anything that sounded negative. I really needed the job.”

Miles shrugs, a miniature absolution. “You and most everyone else, I bet. Except the executives.”

Miles’ hands twitch closed after the last word, and he rubs his thumb over one index finger absently. “We should get going,” he says, heading for the door.

“Tell me one more thing first.”

“Yeah?”

“What do I look like?”

Miles turns and looks him up and down, shrugs again. “You look like somebody who’s been running and hiding his way through this place for a day and half. Barefoot, no less. Cute, for a guy who works with computers.”

He opens his mouth but finds himself too flummoxed to say anything, as if it’s the summer before college again and Miles is the first man who ever spoke to him this way, his only departure from an unremarkably straight romantic life. Miles isn’t too far off from Jay on the surface, especially when he gives Waylon that crooked grin again. So cocky. So much swagger. Under better circumstances, he would have come here with a full security detail as the star reporter for some resource-rich media outlet. They would have turned him back as soon as the nature of this place became clear. They would have tried, at least. At home, there’d be so many hearts throbbing with love for Miles, and with fear, and with the thrill of following a handsome face into certain danger. Not just hearts, probably. He almost has to shake himself. Get it together, Waylon. Get your ass home. 

“That was inappropriate,” Miles says. “I’m sorry.”

There’s a gleam in his eye and a microscopic smile on his lips that suggest he’s sorry for saying it out loud but certainly not for looking at Waylon like that. It’s sensible to assume that a man fresh from Gluskin’s lair wouldn’t want to hear how attractive he is again for another fifty years or so. Even if Eddie had never existed, it’s an odd time and place for that sort of thing. But, hearing it felt so good. So normal. Like they’ve just met in some clean, bright place far from here. Like they could sit down for coffee and a friendly chat without even one mangled corpse or tortured soul in the room with them. Like everything’s fine and Mount Massive never existed. Say it again, he wants to tell Miles. Say anything, it doesn’t matter. Just let me stay in the light with you. 

Miles starts to apologize again, more earnestly now, and the spell is broken. Waylon let it drag out into awkwardness and embarrassment. “Please don’t worry about it,” is all he can say, but Miles is quicker than that.

“Were you trying to ask me if you look like one of the patients?”

He tries to laugh it off, ends up with only a weak sigh. “I must not. I mean, you would have reacted. You wouldn’t have said...I understand that I don’t, it’s fine.”

“Okay. Can I get you to look in a mirror before we go, though?”

“I don’t need to.”

“You sure? The water works, you can wash up if you want.”

Any token resistance Waylon could come up with flows away from him at the mere mention of washing. He doesn’t feel the worst of his imagined dirt between his toes anymore, but the real thing is nasty enough. It feels like it's all over him, even under his clothes. Still, he can’t very well strip down and have a sponge bath in front of Miles and isn’t sure he’d use a shower if they came across one. Clothes feel like armor after the sight and feel of his naked body spread in front of a spinning blade. Washing his face and hands sounds a lot better. 

“I haven’t found any soap yet,” Miles says. “Lots of other things, but no soap.”

“I think I’ll manage.”

The water is brutally cold and looks unclear even in this dim light, but it feels like bathing in some immaculate stream right out of a nature documentary. Dirt and grit and dried blood give way to uncorrupted skin that isn’t quite real to him until he looks up. There he is, same old Waylon. Soft, completely unintimidating features that don’t conceal deception or anything else well, helping guarantee that he’d be caught about ten minutes after blowing the whistle. Big eyes that are either hazel or light brown, depending on the viewer. Haunted now, but nothing like he feared. Chest hair peeking out of his collar. _You’re the hairiest, prettiest little nerd I’ve ever slept with_ , Lisa said after their first time together. He laughed with her, more touched by that appraisal than any other he’d ever received. He has some vivid bruises now, from Blaire and his lackey, from any number of collisions with the other flora and fauna of Mount Massive, but he’s not permanently marked here any more than he was down below. There’s nothing that can’t heal. No one out in the world will be able to look at him and know immediately where he’s been. He’s been secretly exiled to outer space, then suddenly permitted to return. 

He’s watching himself in wonder when Miles’ reflection catches his eye, smiling a little behind him. He turns away when he knows he’s been seen, and there’s a flash of shining red. Blood on Miles’ face. When Waylon tries to focus on it, it’s gone. A secret whispered and forgotten. 

“Don’t forget your feet,” Miles says, laying a shabby towel over the edge of the neighboring sink.

“My...did you find shoes?”

“I found _your_ shoes. Your clothes, too. The room switched before I could grab those, sorry.”

Miles hands him his Chucks. He’s had them for at least a couple of years, worn them over and over again without thinking about them at all, but now he’s back in the shoe store the day he bought them, having taken the boys out on a day off from his last job. His normal job with a normal company he had no idea would fold before long, pushing him toward Murkoff in a way that feels deliberate now, sinister. He’s teaching Ryan how to tie his own new pair, just like dad’s. Watching that sweet, gap-toothed face light up with understanding. Ethan, always more of a sandal fan, is babbling skeptically at them from his stroller. They’ll wait for Lisa to meet them at an ice cream parlor afterwards, and Waylon won’t be able to resist taking some small part in what seems like a running competition between the boys to see who can end up with the messiest face. Lisa will walk in soon, radiant in her subdued work colors. She’ll shake her head at her guys, laughing her way over to them. His heart aches with missing them, but with gratitude, too. It’s not over. He can make it out of here, all the way home. He’s so fucking lucky. 

“Wow,” he breathes.

“Just put them on so we can go,” Miles says, but not without a smile.

Waylon finishes washing and slips his socks and shoes on, struck speechless by how good they feel. He walks out of the locker room with Miles, not daring to look back. Eddie will be there in the gloom, laying out his wedding gown, assembling his deathbed. Ready to welcome his darling bride home.


End file.
